In a system for installing object class defining information according to the prior art, either one of the following two installing methods were used.
The first method, as in the C++ language developed by the AT&T Bell Laboratories of the U.S. as an extension of the C language and realized as a C source generating preprocessor, is to staticly take in characteristics to be inherited for the class in which instances are generated at the time of developing a program such as compile or link. Objects sharing a sequence of operations are regarded as belonging to the same class, and a specific object is refered to as an instance of the class.
This first method is too static to take advantage of the class definition by the object-oriented model in operation, but this advantage is limited to definition. Thus, a change in superclass definition makes it necessary for all subclass definitions to be compiled or linked anew. Moreover, there is the disadvantage that neither compiling nor linking is possible during the operation of network management.
The second method is a method of dynamically deferring, as in a small talk language, to characteristics to be inherited from subclass definition to superclass definition every time an instance is accessed. This method, however, is too dynamic for its performance to permit practical use. Since the possibility for class definition to take place during the operation of network management is very remote, this second method has the disadvantage of excessive redundancy.
An object of the present invention is to provide a system for installing object class defining information free of the above stated disadvantages, making it possible to change object class definitions during the operation of network management and capable of meeting a request for real-time instance generation.